The Drobo FS in-depth, Part 2: day-to-day use

In Part 2 of this in-depth review of the Drobo FS, Ars looks at what it's like …

Dropbear SSH

This one's important, as it gives command-line junkies direct access to the Drobo's underlying filesystem:

Connecting via ssh

The big concatenated file system of all the hard drives in the Drobo is visible as /dev/sda1. It's formatted as ext3, one of the most common journaled Linux file systems, and all of the Drobo shares live underneath that.

Look familiar?

There aren't a lot of things you can really do to the Drobo from the command line, but it gives us a window into things that aren't ordinarily visible. The Drobo has a pretty standard POSIX-compliant root file system layout.

It's a passwd file!

Local users and groups are stored in the expected place in the passwd file, and there's even a shadow file with hashed passwords in it.

If you're the type who likes to do your ssh authentication by key instead of by username/password, it's very easy to get that set up—just make a ".ssh" directory under /mnt/Drobo FS, chmod the directory to 700, copy your public key from the host you'll be using to log in and save it in "~/.ssh/authorized_keys", chmod that file to 600, and bounce the dropbear ssh service with "/mnt/Drobo FS/Shares/DroboApps/dropbear/service.sh restart". Presto!

(Props go to DroboSpace users cabbey and georg_freund and the instructions they provided in this thread on DroboSpace.)

However, neat as it is, the main reason why you'd need to be messing around with a shell is to change configuration file options for your DroboApps, and the apps are all constructed such that their configuration files can be modified from network shares, without needing a shell. So it goes.

unfsd

Linux users don't need to feel left out in the cold with all this hot Drobo action—they can play, too! The unfsd DroboApp is a simple NFS daemon that you can use to export directories on the Drobo FS as NFS mounts for your *nix-y boxes. Once it's installed, exporting shares is as easy as editing the exports file.

Yep, it's an NFS export

I've got a single share exported, which I'm using for rsync backups from my Ubuntu server. On the Ubuntu side, I've got the export added into /etc/fstab so that it's mounted on boot:

Contents of the fstab file on an Ubuntu box, mounting an NFS export from the Drobo FS

It mounts and behaves exactly like a regular NFS v3 export...which it is, so no surprises there.

What the NFS share looks like from the server doing the mounting

There's currently no support for NFS v4, so you can't do any of the fancy v4 stuff, but for sharing files in a home LAN, v3 is perfectly sufficient. On my little Linux box I've got a bash script that gets kicked off by cron every six hours to back up its important stuff via rsync, and because I'm using an NFS mount, I don't have to worry about running an rsync daemon on the Drobo FS. One is available, but I haven't bothered with it.

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.